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Antiphon was the son of Sophilus, and his deme was Rhamnus. He was a pupil of his father (for his father was a sophist, and it is said that Alcibiades as a boy attended his school), and having acquired power in speaking - as some think, through his own natural ability - he entered upon a public career. And he set up a school and had his disagreement with Socrates on the subject of words, not in a contentious spirit, but for the sake of argument, as Xenophon has narrated in his Memoirs.Xenophon, Memorabilia, i. 6. And he wrote some speeches for citizens who wanted them for their suits in the law-courts, being the first who practised this profession, as some say. At any rate no legal oration is extant of any of those who lived before his time, nor of his contemporaries either, because the custom of speech-writing had not yet arisen; there is none by Themistocles, Aristeides, or Pericles, although the times afforded them many opportunities and also occasions when such speeches were needed. And it was not for lack of ability that they refrained from such speech-writing, as is evident from what is said by the historians about each of the abovementioned orators. Yet all those whom we are able to record as having practised this kind of speeches, going back to the earliest occurrence, will be found to have followed Antiphon when he was already old; I mean such as Alcibiades, Critias, Lysias, and Archinus. He was also the first to publish rules of the art of oratory, being of sharp intellect, and for this reason he was nicknamed Nestor.
